Whether you’re planning to pursue a career in consulting, finance, marketing or even entrepreneurship, when you think about challenges you’ll face on the job, you probably think about juggling multiple projects, motivating teams and outmaneuvering competitors. However, some of the most difficult challenges you’ll face in business will be when your value or belief system conflicts with what you’re expected to do for your employer. CBS students got a taste of these challenges when discussing the Jonah Creighton case during orientation and learned that taking the moral high ground may not be the most effective tactic in resolving difficult issues. So, as future leaders, how will we handle these sticky situations? Professor Feiner role-playing While all of us have been taking our core classes, Prof. Michael Feiner has been reading the 500 essays we submitted during orientation about ethical issues we faced in our careers and how we dealt with them. Last Tuesday, Prof. Feiner asked students in a packed Uris 301 auditorium what they would do if faced with the same issues their classmates encountered. For 90 minutes, students put themselves in their classmates’ shoes and role-played through a few situations with Prof. Feiner playing an impatient and painfully blunt boss. In the first essay, a classmate working as an account manager at an IT consultancy was taught that in order to determine the price for his company’s services, he must first find out how deep a client’s coffers are. Regardless of the cost of the services, clients with deeper pockets would be billed at a higher rate than those with slimmer budgets. In the second essay, a colleague of a classmate authored a report for policymakers on importance of access to prescription drugs for Medicaid enrollees with mental disorders. The report contained a paragraph discussing the equal efficacy and lower costs of generic drugs relative to their branded equivalents. Before final submission however, a large pharmaceutical company and generous donor to the non-profit for which she worked, asked her to remove a paragraph. Moreover, the organization she worked for wasn’t going to acknowledge the pharmaceutical company’s contributions in terms of funding or the influence it exerted over the paper’s content. Students discuss approaches Students at the workshop discussed amongst themselves how they would respond if faced with the same situations, then role-played their solutions with Prof. Feiner. The first and most common solution was to explain to the boss how the unethical practice would negatively affect the long-term prospects of the company. However this purely-rational approach can be easily dismissed with the argument that "it hasn’t been a problem yet, so why worry about it?"  Trying to chose the lesser of two evils, some students levered-up their argument by inventing anecdotal evidence that clients were finding out about the company’s unethical behavior and weren’t happy with the situation. Other tactics were to just ignore the unethical practice and go about your business, or quit altogether. Another solution was the whistle-blower approach in which a subordinate would get aggressive and in effect call the boss out on the carpet. On this Prof. Feiner cautioned, “You better know who you’re dealing with. If you try to use power with someone who has more power than you, you’re going to get taken out.” Near the end of the workshop, Prof. Feiner said the most common responses to ethical dilemmas mentioned in the essays fell into four categories:   Obeying orders in fear of reprisal; Quitting the organization; Trying to speak out but failing to persuade; or  Avoiding reliance on the moral high ground, but tactfully causing change. Unfortunately, the last of these categories was also the least frequent. At a business school with some of the brightest students in the world, why do we have such a hard time winning at ethics? Prof. Feiner summarized the research on the topic by saying that most people fail because they try to “wing it”. The variable that best predicts the outcome is not the clarity of the logic, but how it’s presented. By assessing the stakeholders, analyzing their personalities and biases, and being creative in reframing the debate from an argument on values to a debate about business, you can turn the tables on tricky situations. Brains alone are not enough. Read an excerpt from Prof. Feiner’s book: The Feiner Points of Leadership.